Stalin Baroque and Viennese eclecticism are fashionable styles again in Baku. It seems that the former has been the only local tradition for monumental architecture, thus now they erect their gigantic public buildings again in the same orientalizing socialist realist style, which was used for the last time sixty years ago here in the Caucasus. Eclecticism, on the other hand, was the style of the quarter of the oil tycoons of the late nineteenth century, and while now they are demolishing the houses of this quarter, they copy their facades, magnified to the height of ten to fifteen floors, to the newly built skyscrapers.

We try to photograph the traces of real life, independent of the scenery of the power, in the sterilized old town. At the kseroks stall, a policeman comes up to us. “Please do not take pictures of this. Soon we will build a new one in its place.”

“The important day is today, but the Soviet past is chasing us all the time, and every day is a struggle for existence. In 25 years we can’t outrun Russian chauvinism and crazy ideas, wars and humiliation. However, happy independence day, my dears…” (A young Georgian)

Twenty kilometers. This is the distance that separates the city of Akhaltsikhe from the border with Turkey. Only twenty kilometers, today. In the past, it was almost impossible to cover these twenty kilometers. In Soviet times, the road linking Tbilisi with Turkey was interrupted a few kilometers after the spa of Borjomi, which was already renowned in Pushkin’s time, and afterward became the favorite destination of the Romanovs, as well as the new Tsars of the Soviet Union, with Stalin first of all. The road winds through gorges and valleys, among houses destroyed by time, as well as grocery stores. Every so often it is interrupted by the passage of grazing cows. Occasionally the green landscape is dotted by old and dilapidated concrete blocks. “It is there”, says Giorgi, a local Armenian and longtime taxi driver, “that the soldiers stood during the Soviet Union”. He makes the gesture of holding a military rifle. “And whoever tried to pass, was shot.” And later: “From here on… only with passport.” During the Soviet Union, the region was a prohibited zone, with many barracks. I have many testimonies from Armenians and Georgians sent to patrol this border zone during their military service. The most controlled zones included the spa town of Abastumani, already famous at the time of the Tsars, which in Soviet times hosted officers of the Red Army and their families. Still today there is an important astronomical observatory on the nearby mountain.

Among the several “sanatoria”, many of which have been abandoned, and among the numerous Soviet buildings in concrete, which still house the few people who remain, there still stands a small Armenian church.

“While they were eating, Jesus took the bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples […].» (Mk 14,22)

“Places do not have locations, but histories” (Tim Ingold). Built in 1898 by two Armenian brothers from Baku, the Armenian church of Abastumani is today in very poor condition, mainly because of the heavy renovations and changes in Soviet times. In fact, during the Soviet period the church was transformed into a bread oven. Besides partly eliminating and partly walling the gavit, the entrance hall of the church, the Soviets also added two buildings, partly built from the carved stones of the destroyed parts: a warehouse for oil and coal, and another for the storage of bread (to be sold in Abastumani and the surrounding villages). Still there are the big wooden shelves and the metal trays in which the ca. 3-kg loaves of were baked. The interior of the church is unrecognizable, were it not for the presence of the consacration crosses around on the walls, and a large plaque at the entrance with the description in Russian and Armenian, that explains genesis and construction of the church. Inside you can still see the big pots for the bread dough, and the large oven in the middle of the building.

The Soviet regime has partly attained its goal. The gesture of transforming a church into something else, something secular and industrial, was an attempt to eliminate any reference point and all structures that might stir the feelings of the local population, which, only a few years earlier, represented certainties. For eighty years, the Soviet regime attempted to replace the cult of the sacred with the cult of the idea.

The transformation from a church directly to the production of a foodstuff that has been always taken for sacred in every culture. The complete secularization and industrialization of bread has changed the meaning of ʻbread’ itself, which during the Soviet period, played an exclusively secular role, and even a role triggered by a secular metamorphosis.

“It is then a major disaster, in which the culture is shown to be extremely fragile and precarious, yet indispensable and irreplaceable. The same cognitive categories and symbolic figures through which a community perceives and understands the world and makes it thinkable, lose their meaning at the very moment when they are most needed. It seems that the world literally ends there. The perception of the whole and the sense of an imminent and irreparable doom become unbearable.” (G. Ligi: Antropologia dei disastri)

During Soviet times, a loft was built behind the brick oven, which was also used as a warehouse. Still there are some mills to knead the dough and perhaps to grind flour. To date, the traces of wax and soot near many crosses are a sign of how, over the years, the church has been visited by the faithful, bearing witness to the reappropriation, if not of the whole building, but at least of its recognition as a sacred place.

In Georgia, the process of transition was one of the most delicate in all the former Soviet world, not only for the violence accompanying it, but also for its contradictions.

Due to the successive trips to Lemberg and Georgia following each other so closely, only now do I have time to “officially” announce our journey to Maramureș and Bukovina, to be launched about three weeks from now. But since many of you have asked about it, and many of you also know the dates, it will certainly take place. The only question is whether we also will have to organize a second tour.

This year we organize our Maramureș-Bukovina tour – on popular demand, as it is already traditional here at río Wang – between 10 and 14 June (Wednesday–Sunday). We leave from Budapest by bus, and arrive through the medieval city of Baia Mare/Nagybánya, the cradle of Hungarian Impressionism and the gate of historical Maramureș, to one of the most archaic regions of Transylvania. We visit its wooden churches included in the list of UNESCO World Heritage and its Hasidic cemeteries, Sighetul Marmației/Máramarossziget, the central town of the region, cut in two by the Tisza river and the Ukrainian-Romanian border, and the “merry cemetery” of Sapânța/Szaplonca. We climb up with the narrow-gauge forestry railway to the virgin forest in the border mountains, to return in the afternoon, along with the wagons loaded with wood, to the Rusyn village of Vișeu de Sus/Felsővisó. We walk to the Horses’ Waterfall and the pass of the Radna Mountains. We visit the Renaissance-style princely monasteries in Bukovina, painted both inside and out with the full symbolism of Orthodox icons, which also feature on the list of UNESCO World Heritage. Our accommodation will be in traditional peasant farms engaged in agroturism, and – if we manage to reserve in time – in the Bukovina monasteries. And this year we will also do what last year we did not dare, due to the political situation: we will go over for a day to the Ukrainian Czernowitz, the traditional center of the region. Our accommodation will be in traditional peasant farms involved in local agrotourism, and in the Bukovina monasteries. On our similar tour of last year, you can read a detailed travel report here.

The participation fee for the five-day tour (accommodation with breakfast + bus from Budapest and back + guide) is 310 euros. Deadline of registration: 31 May, the usual e-mail wang@studiolum.com.

Our previous posts from the the former county of Maramureș (click for a full map), which will increase in the following weeks.

A bus goes daily from Istanbul to Baku, it stops sometime in the afternoon on the highway around Kutaisi, at a Turkish grill. We fix the appointment by phone with the company, they will call us at the hostel from where we will have to leave. A taxi comes for us at four, it takes us to a small office in the outskirts. The Laz – a Muslim Georgian from Turkey – office manager is extremely nice. He orders a taxi, which takes us for twenty lari – about eight euros – to Zestaponi, thirty kilometers away, where the highway coming from the Turkish border through Batumi meets the Kutaisi-Tbilisi highway. At the roadside grill they serve both Georgian and Turkish food, and Turkish programs are playing on the TV hanging on the wall. Here, you can see an important function of the Turkish fast food places along the Georgian highways: they provide a continuous Turkish thread to follow for those traveling through the country. The bus arrives, with air-conditioning and wifi, the clientele is from the upper, relatively wealthy layer of Azerbaijani guest workers in Istanbul. They lunch, we leave. We stop once more, not much before the border, after the former industrial and now ghost town of Rustavi, north of the desert of David Gareja, at the Gaziantep Muslim restaurant, which is already quite similar to the roadside eating-houses in Kurdistan.

An hour later we are at the border, above Ganja. In the modern building of the Georgian border station, just like in all the country, the stray dogs stroll about freely. The Georgian border guards look astonished at the Azerbaijani electronic visa, introduced in last year, they have never seen such a thing. They ask for help by phone, but they receive none. They ask us several times whether we are sure that we can enter Azerbaijan with this thing. If not, we are welcome for the night in the waiting room. Afterfinally rubber-stamping our passports, we then make a half-kilometer walk in no man’s land, like at the Iranian border stations, with all of our luggage. For us, this is only a backpack, but most of our fellow travelers move on as a spectacular caravan. Along the walk, some luxurious duty free shops brightly lit in the night, the Azeris standing around hasten offer us their help in buying cigarettes there, it seems that those coming home cannot do this for some reason. On the Azerbaijani border they make us unpack every bag to inspect the contents. They try to open my notebook computer, after some tries I offer my help, they are grateful for it. They ask about each electronic gadget, the external HDs, the scanner, the external DVD reader, the chargers, how they are called in English and in Russian. They find it amusing. We wait a long time in the bus – even now, as I write this – for all the passengers to pass through the customs gauntlet, and in the meantime we chat with the others. The woman with bleached-blonde hair has a textile business in Baku, she goes twice a year to Turkey to sign contracts for Italian, English, and Spanish goods, just now her elegant store is being built in the new shopping quarter of Baku. “I love our President very much”, she reveals a sincere confession. “He is so positive, so civilized. And my parents really loved his father.” When was I in Baku for the last time? “In three years Baku changed so much, you will not recognize it.” Does this mean, a thing of which I am sore afraid, that they have completely destroyed the old town? On the morrow, I will give the answer.

The waiter and a local electrician – who paid for our first breakfast – try to insert the wifi code in my notebook, in Café Baku at the central bus station. Photo by Lloyd Dunn

The Holy Trinity Church of Gergeti was built so high up, just beneath Kazbegi Peak, right under the “roof of the Caucasus”, that, just as they say about other sites – the San Apollinare in Classe in Ravenna, or some other prominent churches –, this alone was not inundated by the Flood.

As the rest of Georgia, which lies to the south of the Jvari Pass, was converted by St. Nino in the 4th century, so Gergeti, lying to the north of it, was converted by a certain St. Dino already before the Flood. His companion represented in the carving of the window is St. Trichontosaurus, who, after some failed attempts to spell it, was left out of the legend, so his name has not survived.Al igual que el resto de Georgia, que yace al sur del paso de Jvari, fue convertida por Santa Ninó en el s. IV, así Gergeti, al norte, fue convertida por cierto San Dino ya antes del Diluvio. Su mascota representada en el relieve de la ventana es san Tricontosaurio, que tras varios intentos fallidos de deletrearlo, fue apartado de la leyenda de modo que su nombre no fue registrado en su momento.

Queen Tamari Bagrationi (თამარი ბაგრატიონი) (Mtskheta 1160-1212) reigned in Georgia from 1184 until her death. She was the eldest daughter of King George III (1156-1184) and Queen Gurandukht. During her reign, Georgia became the most important state of the Caucasus region. She greatly expanded the borders of the country at the expense of the neighboring Muslim powers. Her importance is shown by the fact, that, in spite of being a woman, she was endowed with the title “King” (მეფე, mefe). After her death she was followed on the throne by her two children, George IV Lasha (1213-1223), and Queen Rusudan (1223-1245). Queen Tamar’s grave has never been identified with certainty.

Under Queen Tamar, Georgian culture also had its golden age. Georgian-language literature was renewed – this is the epoch of Shota Rustaveli, author of the Georgian national epic –, and, in the wake of the construction of a large number of churches, fine arts also flourished.

Tamar-era castles in the Vardzia Valley

The castle of Abastumani looks down on the valley of Adigeni, some thirty kilometers from Akhaltsikhe. The fortress, built under the reign of Queen Tamar, has survived in a good condition. From the peak rising near Abastumani one could well control the two valleys and the neighboring highlands. The valley leads from Akhaltsikhe to Kutaisi, and in the age it was an important trade route towards the Armenian and Turkish region. This explains the construction of the large number of fortresses in the villages along the route, and the presence of such towns and fortified monasteries as Vardzia or Vanis Kvabebi. In the Soviet period the fortress was often visited, as it is shown by the several Cyrillic inscriptions on its walls. Today it is only looked up by a few tourists who know it exists, and by local believers, as it is attested by the icons and candles placed in wall niches, as well as the large cross of Saint Nino.

The icon of Queen – King – Tamar stands alone in a niche which is difficult to reach, highlighting the devotion to the Queen and her significance. Her feast – თამარობა, Tamaroba – is celebrated today, on 14 May all over Georgia.